Beat'Em

Beat’em is a virtual reality rhythm game in which guests punch and kick robot enemies within a 360 degree arena. Enemies fly at the guest with the beat to encourage rhythmic action. Your goal is to try and get the high score and Beat’em.

As an artist my role was to create the environment surrounding the playing area as well create the characters that the players were to punch and kick. For the environment, we wanted to create an arena field with a futurist Tron look to it. From week one to week three the environment changed drastically due to my experimentation with volumetric light and post processing.

Since we had three weeks rather than 2 weeks to work on this project, I had time to experiment with volumetric light to make the scene feel more futuristic. I also added dust particle effects to add to the feeling.

Beginning lighting

End lighting

I also had to work on creating robot characters for the game. This was new as I haven’t done much character creation so I was able to make numerous variations to see what would work best for the character.

Concept Art:

Since these robots were to be punched or kicked, I had to play around with creating models that were small but looked evil. In the end, I took a robot I created early on, and changed the eyes from circles to sharp pointy eyes, and then created variations from that robot for the different levels we had: upper, middle, and feet and shield.

Variations of 3D Robots:

Test of some robots with texture and post processing

In the end we had blue, pink, yellow, and purple robots

Challenges: I think one of the biggest challenges for me was creating the robot characters and figure out how to change them based on their color, and make it easy for guest playing to quickly understand which one they’re about the hit.